美国国家公共电台 NPR A Noir Novel For The Trump Era, From Jonathan Lethem

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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Of the oceans of ink spilled by writers wrestling with the Trump¹ presidency², it's probably safe to say that Jonathan Lethem is the only one who has managed to produce a book featuring the following - one, a shootout on a decrepit³ Ferris wheel; two, hippies living off the grid⁴ - like, really off the grid in California; and, three, a detective who keeps a live possum in his desk drawer. Lethem's new novel is titled "The Feral Detective." And he - Lethem, that is, not the feral detective, alas⁵ - joins me now. Jonathan Lethem, welcome.

JONATHAN LETHEM: (Laughter) Thanks. Nice to be with you.

KELLY: Good to have you with us. So I want to ask how you came to write this book. You sat down and started writing it January 2017. How come?

LETHEM: Yeah. Well, you know, I'd been planning a book before that. I had a notion about the desert and this feral child who grows up to be a detective who finds missing people in the desert. And I was, you know, very complacently⁶ thinking it was - this would be a nice project to write during the Hillary Clinton administration. And then the fall of 2016 came, and I was sort of undone⁷. I looked at what was on my desk, and it looked about as useless as could be. I didn't think I had a book or...

KELLY: Why, it just felt suddenly frivolous⁸ or what?

LETHEM: I probably in some ways was better prepared than some people because I used to be a science fiction writer. But I felt like I was living in a really different universe. And I wasn't sure that this book meant anything or that being a novelist meant all that much. But I sort of got back on my horse, like we all had to do. And then I looked at the materials and I realized I'd conceived Phoebe, who was a first-person female narrator, and that she could be, you know, the mouthpiece for my confusion, that actually...

KELLY: Phoebe - I should mention she's a reporter. She's a journalist. And she shares your sense of disorientation after the 2016 election. She actually quits her job as a reporter at The New York Times.

LETHEM: And the question that was really important to me was, do they look different because they changed or because they were unmasked, because our reality had a kind of disguise torn off of it? And if I believed the second, which in many ways is what I came to feel, then my book did make sense. My book was about kind of ancient archetypal fissures⁹ in individuals and societies and between men and women. And I thought, well, OK, you know, I can try.

KELLY: And you end up using Phoebe as your envoy¹⁰ into this world. You talked about you couldn't make sense of what was happening in the country; maybe Phoebe can make sense of it. Let's send her and see where she goes.

LETHEM: Yeah. Even make sense of it is probably overstating it. In a lot of ways, this is a book about trying not to think about the election. It's about running off into a free space where maybe you can conceive that there isn't just a right and a left, a red and a blue, a man and a woman, but that there's some kind of possible reinvention. In that sense, it's a - you know, it's chasing the old American fantasy of the frontier, which is a kind of, you know, utopian space where something can be - a new kind of world can be set up.

KELLY: You do set up Phoebe as a rabidly anti-Trump character. She refers to him as the beast. She refers to him as the idiot. And I wonder. Do you worry that you're going to turn off half your potential readers?

LETHEM: I don't know. I - it really has mostly to do with her being a New Yorker and feeling like the weird¹¹ guy from Queens who we'd all been taking for granted as kind of a medium-foreground peculiarity¹² in our environment was suddenly thrust upon the entire world, that that had really snuck up on us because it was a different thing for New Yorkers who were familiar with Donald Trump. He wasn't a new story.

KELLY: I mean, not to give people listening the wrong idea because we're talking a lot about politics and what was going on in America in real life as you're writing this book, the book actually is your characters living through this moment in January 2017 but not paying great attention to daily developments in Washington. They're, as I mentioned, involved in shootouts in a Ferris wheel in the desert in California.

LETHEM: I agree. We're being totally misleading. It's basically just a long chase scene interrupted by spasms¹³ of sex and violence.

KELLY: (Laughter).

LETHEM: There's really - it's..

KELLY: I think you just sold a million copies right there.

LETHEM: I've never written a book as quickly because the velocity¹⁴ of the story and the antic nature of the characters swept me along. I was also - along with thinking about the election, I was hiding from all of that. I was just using this as a place to go and make up a world that was briefly¹⁵ - one I could be amused and kind of consoled by.

KELLY: Without giving away plot twists or the ending, I think I can say that you leave things a little unsettled at the end. We don't quite know where your characters are headed next or who might be by their side. Was that deliberate?

LETHEM: Yeah, the book is a snapshot. And it's a snapshot of, you know, Phoebe and myself in, you know, the five days before and the five days after the inauguration¹⁶. And they've survived some things. And they sort of are together. But they're also in a car in motion - you know? - which I guess describes how I feel just about every day.

KELLY: Jonathan Lethem - his new novel is "The Feral Detective." It's out this week. Thank you so much.

LETHEM: Thank you so much - treat to talk to you.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUNGBLOOD BRASS BAND'S "BROOKLYN")